The Vineyard Gazette won two top awards for excellence in journalism this week, including a Publick Occurrences award for its special section and website called Living on the Edge, the Coastal Erosion Project published in 2013. This is the second straight year that the Gazette has won this award.

The Vineyard Gazette and a middle school class from the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School have won a first-place award in the national Newspaper and Education Contest. In the project the Gazette helped the class, which was studying the history of slavery in the U.S., create a newspaper about the modern day slave trade.

The newspaper won 30 awards for excellence in in reporting, photography, graphic design and advertising — both in print and digital publishing — in the annual contest sponsored by the New England Newspaper and Press Association.

It’s difficult to imagine today, but there was a time before resorthood on Martha’s Vineyard — a time before summer houses, before restaurants and shops and sportfishing and sailing, a time before people on the mainland even began to think that they might deserve a vacation every once in awhile on a pretty Island far from home.

The Vineyard Gazette has received a Publick Occurrences award from the New England Newspaper and Press Association (NENPA) for its coverage of the Schifter house move on Chappaquiddick.

The award, presented at the NENPA fall conference Thursday, recognizes outstanding journalism for a series of stories written by Gazette reporter Sara Brown and accompanied by photographs by Ray Ewing.